WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A small asteroid will travel
relatively near to Earth next week, giving astronomers a rare
opportunity for a close-up look.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 was first seen in October and is on a
trajectory to pass Earth outside the Moon's orbit at a distance
of 334,000 miles on Tuesday at 3:33 a.m.

NASA said it will not be visible to the naked eye but
amateur astronomers with modest-sized telescopes should be able
to spot it.

NASA said the asteroid is anywhere between 500 feet and
2,000 feet long, and there is no chance it could hit the
planet.

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Astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico will
be taking as close a look as they can as the building-sized
object hurtles past.

"We don't yet know anything about this asteroid," Mike
Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Puerto Rico observatory,
said in a statement.

He said such objects frequently pass near Earth, perhaps
one every five years or so, but such advance notice is rare.

TU24 is one of an estimated 7,000 so-called near-Earth
objects.

"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this,
and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen
before," said Nolan. "We really haven't sampled the population
enough to know what's out there."

After that, it will be nearly 20 years before such an
opportunity presents itself again.

"This will be the closest approach by a known asteroid of
this size or larger until 2027," said Don Yeomans, manager of
the Near Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, which watches for objects that could potentially
threaten Earth.

(Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham and Stuart
Grudgings)